COPPA Compliance

  • Has anyone run into COPPA compliance issues on a wordpress site? I’m helping a friend set up a site to market his album of children’s music. COPPA is Child Online Privacy Protection Act and regulates the collection of personally identifiable information from children under the age of 13.

    https://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/coppa.htm

    At a minimum, I think I need to add a check box to the registration page that asks if you are 12 or under and a link to the privacy policy of the site that clearly spells out how information about child users is used by the site. Additionally, posts by users that are children should not be personally identifiable (eg. WordPress should change their comments to say “posted by a young fan” or something).

    A little more advanced usage would be to collect the parent’s email address to ask for permission to create the user account and/or send marketing info (upcoming concerts, new album, etc.) to their kids. If my friend wants to rent his marketing database, it would be nice to be able to easily remove the child users from that list.

    Any thoughts?

    If not, then I’m going to need some help writing my first WordPress plug-in.

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  • Yup, don’t collect any data. ??

    As long as those children don’t identify themselves as underage or you’re marketing for them, you should be fine.

    In all honesty though, I’d talk to an attorney. There’s some case history that says even an email address is personal data, even if you don’;t have anyting to attach it to.

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